Educational Impasse: Teaching and Learning Storytelling when You Are the Story

For two years straight, Illinois was unable to pass a state budget. Northeastern Illinois University, among many others, was caught in the crosshairs. The school fronted funding (MAP grants) for low-income students, draining its reserves.  NEIU lacked monies to keep faculty, staff and students workers paid, so instituted furlough days two years in a row. The school laid off some 180 employees, many directly involved in student support students.

NEIU journalism students have been particularly hard hit. Some have looked to transfer; all have worried if they would graduate. A few took eight classes each, just so they could graduate “in time.”

Some told their stories to the media, while others created media about their stories. What does it mean to engage students with a crisis that is happening to them? Can the experience empower them? Over the course of three semesters, we have used several methods to document the situation: a “Listening Post” with impromptu recorded interviews, interviews with local media outlets, letters to state representatives and critical analysis of the coverage.

This panel will present faculty and students’ perspectives on learning and doing journalism during a time that affects them profoundly. How does one maintain objectivity or at least neutrality? How do we make use of new media to make impact? How does one engage a student population that has other concerns and responsibilities?

Let’s Start a Revolution: How To Get Your Newsroom to Invest in its Audience

Do you feel empowered to influence the culture of your organization? Can you change your journalism — and your colleagues’ — to prioritize the audience’s needs and voices? By taking small steps, being strategic, and maybe even operating under the radar, you could have more power than you think to effect real change.

Drawing on what we’ve learned working with a combined 180+ newsrooms at the Coral Project and the Trusting News Project, this workshop will provide an opportunity for you to collaboratively generate concrete strategies for building trust with audiences – and building your newsroom’s investment in engagement at the same time. Let’s be the change we want to see in the news.

Small Newsroom, Big Ag: How to Navigate the Nexus of Corporate Accountability Through Engagement

At the heart of many stories in the Midwest is a connection to “Big Ag” – multibillion-dollar agriculture corporations that have a huge influence on farms, communities, the environment and economy, both locally and across the world. And while Big Ag has gotten bigger, many newsrooms in the heartland have become smaller, making it more important than ever to consistently listen to people in areas where these companies have their footprint.

We’ll discuss how to hold tight-lipped and powerful corporations accountable while maintaining trust across diverse communities, how to overcome geographic challenges to connect directly with rural audiences and how to produce investigative reporting that’s driven by public engagement. We will also provide a guide for how newsrooms can maintain an ongoing presence in rural communities, which will include our list of questions you definitely shouldn’t ask a farmer.

A How-To for Using Deliberative Dialogue in Audience Engagement

Our session will be a mixed presentation and interactive workshop format focused on deliberative dialogue. Deliberative dialogue is a method of deep community engagement involving a diverse participant cohort and intensive, creative conversation about pressing community issues.

The presentation will highlight the benefits of deliberative dialogue for news media organizations to inform their reporting and audience engagement efforts. The workshop will teach journalists, audience engagement practitioners, and others about designing and implementing deliberative conversations, including crafting a relevant and timely charge, recruiting participants, structuring outcomes in a way that meet the needs of journalists and community members, and introduce basics of facilitation and moderation.

Measure Your Civic Impact: New Tools for Open Assessment and Actionable Evaluation

As an actor in the people-powered journalism community, you are engaging under-represented communities in reporting about the stories and issues that matter most to their future lives. But how are you measuring the full impact of your work on issues, individuals and institutions in the short and long term? Drawing from extensive work in evaluation and assessment of civic media literacies among youth, Convergence Design Lab will guide you through a hands-on rapid evaluation design sprint aimed at creating a social impact assessment strategy tailored to your own organization. Capacity-building resources will be shared, including examples of creative tools for tracking civic learning and community impact developed with our clients and partners.

Shared Goal, Different Meanings: How Different News Organizations Pursue More Engaged Audiences

Though news publishers throughout the world are increasingly focused on the pursuit of audience engagement, there is little consensus on how engagement should be defined or measured. This session will explore how different news organizations in Chicago — The Chicago Tribune, City Bureau, and Hearken — conceptualize and attempt to pursue more engaged audiences. Drawing on research collected from three case studies over the past year, this session will examine how the people working within each of these news organizations thinks about who the news audience is and how news publishers should best attempt to approach them. In doing so, it will provide an in-depth look at the differences and similarities about journalism and the public within Chicago’s news media ecosystem.

We’re Funders. Ask Us Anything.

We’ll answer your difficult, delicate questions and share our dos and don’ts for fundraising / relationship building. You’ll tell us about the opportunities and obstacles to community-centered journalism and how philanthropy might help.

Want to make sure your question is answered? Click here to submit it ahead of time on our Google form.

Beyond Red and Blue: collaborative engagement across echo chambers in rural and small-town media

How can we break down echo chambers at the local level? We share a model that attempts to do this anchored in a city all too familiar with the foibles of partisan news coverage and fake news—Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Over the past 6 months, we’ve undertaken a research study with the aim of informing a local journalism and engagement intervention. We held focus groups and interviews and invited residents to keep ‘story diaries’ of the news media they used and who they talked with about it. Our findings examine how polarization plays out in daily life, and complicate assumptions about red and blue communities. Building on this, we explored pathways to spark dialogue across lines of party and demographics—including via local media.

Following our study, we held a workshop connecting local radio, television, and print—including rural weeklies and hyperlocals from rural counties. The workshop explored how local media, particularly rural and small town media, can respond to engage communities on local issues. This includes both issues that cross party lines, and those that have been politicized, such as immigration. Workshop participants generated a plan for a collaborative local media initiative with the aim of addressing some of the structural challenges facing rural and small town media, while exploring community engagement and solutions-oriented coverage.

You Need to Be There: Rebuilding Relevance Through Engagement

You may have communities or neighborhoods that don’t trust or engage with your news organization, and you could be to blame. If that makes you uncomfortable, that’s good. Now it’s time to accept your role and decide what you can do to change the situation.

At the Peoria Journal Star, we know that because we did it. Just a few years ago, many Peoria residents had all but written us off as irrelevant. In this session, we’ll talk about how we changed that and share what we’ve learned.

Like any good beat reporter, editors also need to grow their sources, know whom to call about an issue, and encourage those sources to call you when they have news to share. That starts with engaging with people and following through by covering the news that makes the community unique. Learn how to reach out, build credibility and maintain the relationship. Dennis Anderson, executive editor of the Journal Star in Peoria, will share strategies on how a newsroom can once again become relevant to a neighborhood that feels ignored.

How to collaborate with community: Work with the public to reveal truth, build trust and do great journalism

We often say that journalism is essential to democracy. Democracy is also essential to journalism if it’s going to survive and thrive. The tricky question is how to let the people in while maintaining the fundamental independence and ethical standards of journalism? It’s not just a matter of the public trusting us; it’s also a matter of newsrooms learning to trust the public.

This session explores lessons from projects in New Jersey that have brought journalists, media-makers, activists and local residents together for innovative collaborations that started with engagement and went much deeper. News Voices: New Jersey director Mike Rispoli will walk through the whats, whys and hows of those projects to help journalists navigate a new level of collaboration. Reporter Michelle Gladden of the hyperlocal news site Asbury Park Sun will talk about her collaboration with a community media center and a teen poetry group to help high school students produce stories giving voices to their lives experiences in a maligned school district. Vanessa Maria Graber will talk about how radio station WPPM is serving people in Philadelphia and Camden by giving them training, technology and a community of support. Rispoli will talk about how student journalists at Rutgers are breaking out of the campus confines to cover New Brunswick’s neighborhoods.

The panel will offer concrete ideas for how to manage expectations, keep collaborations alive and use the process to bridge the divide between local journalists and the people they serve. Printed toolkits available to all who attend.

Creating Contact Zones: Civic Storytelling as Community-Engaged Journalism

How can public radio create a new kind of listening experience where wildly diverse people come together and share stories, exploring their commonalities, differences, dreams and challenges?

Here’s one idea: by creating Contact Zones. These are spaces where people who wouldn’t ordinarily cross paths come together and grapple with social issues and each other’s messy experiences of them.  Where powerful radio pieces ignite personal story sharing and frank conversation—the kind that busts stereotypes and generates emotional border crossings—in an atmosphere that is beautiful, respectful and relevant.

As part of Capital Public Radio’s multiplatform documentary on the affordable housing crisis in Sacramento, California, I’m collaborating with community partners to pilot two types of Contact Zones.

STORY CIRCLES are intimate gatherings held in affordable housing complexes and community centers that bring low-income residents and public radio audiences together to examine the housing crisis via personal stories.

POSTCASTS are station-based events that involve reporters, residents, community leaders and decisionmakers in activities that link analysis, imagination and action.  These convenings use podcast and broadcast content to seed civic conversations that build understanding and ideas for moving solutions forward.

This interactive presentation will cover how Contact Zones fit into Capital Public Radio’s community engagement model, our collaborative design process, our methods and outcomes. I’ll share photos and lessons learned from these pilot endeavors and make time for Q&A and table discussions on how participants can apply these ideas back home.

“A Conspiracy of Good People”: Building Public Media’s Capacity Through Partnerships

When I took a job as a Localore producer in the fall of 2015, I knew I wanted to address the issue of commemoration in what was once the Capital of the Confederacy and a major node of the domestic slave trade: Richmond, Virginia. I also knew I wanted to work with and for the community in telling its own story. Through nine months of production and engagement, I became drawn to a diverse group of changemakers that includes designers, planners, artists, and historians who are challenging Richmond’s commemorative landscape in innovative and equitable ways. Working within this community, I’m setting out to build a public media ecosystem in Richmond that is inclusive, responsive to community needs, and informed by our city’s history. I’m proposing a presentation and panel discussion between me and two partners with whom I collaborate in this work.

Free Egunfemi is a historical visionary who brings to light untold histories of self-determined Richmond through her initiative Untold RVA.

Ryan Rinn is Executive Director of Storefront for Community Design, a design services firm that “works at the scale of human relationships, forming friendships and facilitating partnerships across disciplinary, physical, and socioeconomic boundaries.”

Together we established Storefront Studio at the Six Points Innovation Center (6PIC) in Richmond’s Highland Park neighborhood. Storefront Studio is an innovation lab where public history intersects with public media and is transforming the city through projects that range from wheatpaste murals to the training of a corps of young journalists.

Community-driven design: Using tools of organizing and media development to assess the information needs of immigrant communities

What if we designed journalism by asking our community:
What information do you want?
What issues concern and impact you?
What tools do you use, and what sources do you go to for information you trust?

The leaders of this workshop have done just that. By collaborating with grassroots organizations to understand a community’s information needs, they have designed new models of journalism that respond to the languages, habits, concerns, and needs of the people those projects serve. Borrowing from practices of socially engaged art and international media development, their approaches to community-driven design provide inspiration and practical tools for journalists, editors, and community organizers.

Me and My Scientist

What if your audience could give you data on the issues you’re reporting on? Whether it’s investigating pollution levels in a community by using air quality monitors, or figuring out how stressed out we feel about politics by doing saliva tests, or tracking the urban heat island effect using temperature and humidity sensors.

Over the past few years, the WNYC health desk has been collaborating closely with scientists, and using their tools, to tell stories about our health. The results are somewhere between journalism and science, and provide data as well as reveal the inner workings of scientific research.  It’s engagement where we — usually along with our audience — explore in a hands-on way the ideas we’re covering in our stories.

In this multimedia session, we’ll dig into the challenges and joys of partnering with scientists and researchers, and the thrills and frustrations in reporting on data from an activity you organized.

Gather lightning talks

Join Andrew DeVigal and the Gather team for a fast-paced, participatory session highlighting five exciting engagement projects and initiatives in journalism. This series of five-minute “lightning talks” will be followed by a Q&A with the presenters, as well as details about how to find additional information and resources on Gather, a “community of practice” platform for engaged journalists.